Users are increasingly relying upon various electronic and computing devices to track, receive, and update various types of information and handle various types of tasks. For example, many users rely upon computing devices to maintain and organize schedules and provide them with reminders for events and notifications of incoming communications, news, and other such information. These reminders and notifications typically come in the form of an alert. In order to alert the user to the receipt of the notification data and/or the new instant message indicated by the notification data, the computing device may output the message with text displayed on a display screen to indicate to the user that the new instant message was received.
Sometimes, the output of a notification based alert may fail in obtaining the attention of the user at a particular time. At other times, although the output of an alert may succeed in obtaining the attention of the user, the output of the alert may be perceived as a distraction, disruption, and/or annoyance, at a particular time since users are increasingly utilizing multiple computing devices, where each device is often tethered to the same email, messaging accounts, and the users are often bombarded with the same reminders and notifications simultaneously on all devices, resulting in multiple redundant audible and visual alerts. As technology advances it can be advantageous to adapt the ways in which these notification alerts are presented to users.